Treading Water
by ncfan
Summary: Eärwen returns to Alqualondë during the Darkening, only to have to go back to Tirion not long afterwards.


I own nothing.

* * *

They were gone, so there was nothing to make her stay here. Eärwen had stayed in Tirion for her husband, for her children. For them, Eärwen had lingered in a strange city for far longer than she had liked. She had put aside all dreams of home. She had done her best to quell all feelings of homesickness, and content herself with the occasional visit home to Alqualondë.

But they were gone now. All six of them, they had vanished into the dark. Eärwen no longer had any reason to stay. Eldalótë begged her to stay, regardless. Anairë did as well. She heard their words and paid them no heed. Eärwen cared for them both, it was time, but she had no obligation to her daughter-in-law or her sister-in-law that could take precedence over her obligation to herself. Her family was gone. There was nothing keeping her here anymore.

There were many in Tirion, and indeed, Eärwen suspected, many in Valinor who feared the darkness that had befallen them. Eldalótë and Anairë, Nerdanel and Findis, they had never known anything but a world lit up with the silver and gold lights of Ninquelótë and Culúrien. They had been born and had grown up in a world bathed in light. Eärwen was not like them. She had been born beneath the stars, to the sound of crashing waves. The crossing to the Undying Lands was a matter of living memory rather than history for her. She did not need the Trees, nor their light, and she did not fear the darkness.

Eärwen set out for home on a swift horse, alone in the darkness. She left without ceremony, and in the near-empty city she left behind, she would be surprised if any even noticed her departure.

-0-0-0-

Their songs were full of mourning.

This, Eärwen first noticed when she was passing through the Calacirya. When she came to visit her home, she was used to being able to hear the songs of the Lindar from as far away as the Calacirya. This was not unusual, especially not on festival days. Eärwen would welcome being able to hear her people's voices. It was like being able to hear their greeting before she even saw Alqualondë.

Their songs were full of mourning.

Eärwen could hear their fair voices, though the words of their songs were beyond her hearing. In those voices, Eärwen heard utter desolation. Those were dirges they were singing.

_Do the Lindar really mourn the Trees so much? Do they really miss their light so much? I'm surprised. I can understand the desolation of the Vaniai. They lived within sight of the Trees; they adored them. The Trees were such a fixture of the Vaniai's world that of course they would be devastated by their sudden loss._

_I understand the Noldor, too. The Trees are dead, their King is slain, and most of their people have flooded out of Tirion. If a Noldor weeps in the streets of their city, I understand._

_But we are the Lindar. The Noldor and the Vaniai call us "half-Avarin at heart," and truth be told, had I been old enough I'd probably have refused to cross the sea myself. The light of the Trees never touched Alqualondë as much as it did Oiolossë or Tirion. We never had as much need of them as the others. Why mourn now?_

She did not understand their mournful songs. All the same, Eärwen spurred her horse onwards, urging him to go faster.

In the city, the songs of mourning commingled and coalesced, so many being sung that Eärwen couldn't pick any one of them out. Neri, nissi and children sat on their front stoops and wept, hiding their faces in their hands, and did not notice as their King's daughter rode among them. Without fanfare, Eärwen rode up the narrow, meandering streets of Alqualondë, a feeling of foreboding settling in her blood like ice. All about her, there was in the air a faint odor of smoke, and something beneath it, like overcooked meat.

No one really noticed her until she reached the palace gates. There, the guardsmen recognized her, and let her inside. The steward led her to her parents.

"Thank all the Valar!" Ránelindë shrieked, nearly hysterical as folded her daughter in a crushing embrace. Olwë was close behind, resting his cheek on top of Eärwen's head. She didn't see her younger brothers, and could only assume that they remained on Tol Eressëa.

"You shouldn't have come," Olwë said heavily, once Ránelindë had let go of Eärwen. "You really should not have come, my daughter."

Eärwen stared at him, brow furrowed. There was something gaunt and shadowed in her father's face, something haunted in his deep blue eyes. _Papa, you shouldn't be so affected by the loss of the Trees, should you? You remember a time without them even better than I do. _She hesitated to tell them why she had come, but there was nothing for it but to explain; Eärwen couldn't keep the truth from them forever. "They… They've gone," she blurted out. "My children, my husband, his brothers and their children. Nearly all of the Noldor have gone." The words spilled from her lips. "They're planning to cross the sea and challenge the Enemy over Finwë's death."

_I don't know if I'll ever see any of them again._

Olwë and Ránelindë looked at each other. The latter looked near tears. The former was grim. Finally, Olwë said, quietly, "We know, Eärwen."

"You've seen them?!"

This gave Eärwen hope. Of course, if the Noldor were planning on crossing the sea into Endóre, they would need ships, and Alqualondë would be the place to go to get them. Eärwen doubted that Olwë would have been able to talk sense into Fëanáro, or even into Nolofinwë, and their children would of course follow them anywhere their fathers told them to go. But Olwë had been a sort of mentor, or father-figure to Arafinwë when he lived at Olwë's court here. Surely Arafinwë would heed the advice of his father-in-law, and surely the children would listen to their grandfather. Had they turned back, after all? Were they here right now?

Ránelindë's tone was very gentle as she said, "There's something you need to know, Eärwen, and you'd best sit down."

-0-0-0-

They told her, and she felt sicker, the more she heard.

Fëanáro had led the host of the Noldor into Alqualondë, demanding use of the Swan-ships to ferry his people across the sea into Endóre. Olwë had attempted to dissuade him from this course of action. These ships were to the Lindar what gems and metalwork and the work of one's hands were to the Noldor. How could you divest us of them?

It was the height of folly to challenge the Enemy, he argued, and even greater folly to directly defy the will of the Valar to do so. The Noldor made the journey across the sea, the same as the Lindar and the Vaniai. The Noldor came to Aman, and swore they would never leave it. Is revenge for your father and the recovery of your jewels worth your home? Is it worth your life, the lives of your sons or the life of your grandson?

But Finwë's firstborn was not swayed. Far from it, he seemed to take Olwë's words as a betrayal of some sort. If the Lindar would not give the Noldor their ships, the Noldor would take them by force.

Fëanáro, his sons, and the Noldor accompanying them at the time had fallen upon the Lindarin mariners, and the quays of Alqualondë ran red with blood. Findekáno and his siblings arrived next with their host, and joined the massacre as well. Nolofinwë came after them. Arafinwë and his sons arrived last.

This, Olwë knew from the reports given to him by the survivors. By the time he had come to the havens, the Noldor were gone.

"Tell me they didn't…" She couldn't finish those thoughts, couldn't bear to say, _Tell me, my husband, my sons, tell me they didn't fight as well._

Olwë shook his head, and Eärwen breathed a secret sight of relief. "No, they didn't. Arafinwë and your boys didn't even get here until after it was over. From what I understand, Nerwen was the only one in the thick of things." He smirked, sickened and bitter and grimly satisfied all at once. "And it was _Noldorin _throats she was skewering, not Lindarin."

A large number of Alqualondë's mariners had been killed in the massacre, and nearly all of their ships had been taken. The Lindar had laid the corpses of their dead, their own people and the dead Noldor alike, to rest, burning their corpses on great funeral pyres that they hoped the Noldor had seen, hoped that they had seen them and felt some remorse for what they had done. There was no telling how long it would be before they were able to build their ships back up; until then, the Lindar could not catch fish and shellfish for their people to eat, and they were dipping into their granaries and storehouses rather extensively in order to feed their people. There was no telling how long it would be before their grief would leave them. Somehow, it seemed doubtful that it ever would.

The story… What Eärwen was told, it sickened her. She struggled to accept it as fact, but the more real it became to her, first with a trip down to the quays with her father, and later with her mother to visit those who had been wounded in the massacre, the sicker she felt, the angrier, the more sorrowful herself.

They, the Lindar, they had finally left Endóre, long after the Vaniai and the Noldor did, because they hoped to escape the sort of life that left them always unsure of their continued survival. Eärwen remembered those days, faintly though she might. She remembered the sentries of the camp, remembered that while the guardsmen around the palace complex in Alqualondë played a purely ceremonial role, those sentries had not. She remembered watching from the edge of the tent as her mother tended the dying, remembered as she watched her mother prepare the bodies of the dead for burial—the burning of corpses had originally been a custom of the Vaniai, that had only caught on among the Noldor in the days of the Great March, and in the Lindar, never until now.

There had been danger in Endóre. No one was sure if they would survive, or if the Enemy and his creatures would drive them all to their deaths. So when Lord Ulmo came, bidding them at last to make the journey to the Undying Lands, many of the Lindar agreed—those who didn't returned into the wilds with Elmo, searching for Elwë Singollo. They had believed that, in the Undying Lands, they would be safe from all violence. But they weren't.

_This should never have happened here._

So many of Eärwen's people had been injured or killed. In their madness, the Noldor were no better than the servants of the Enemy who had crept on the edges of the Lindarin camp, picking off stragglers and the weak. They killed and ravaged, just the same as them. They killed the Lindar, just the same as them.

_Is that what you are, then, when you don't get what you want? Just monsters? Just monsters driven by greed? I'll be honest, I never saw that side of you, but in retrospect, it makes more sense than it should. Fëanáro always put too much store by the works of his hands, the Silmarils especially. The Noldor always desire to acquire more, more knowledge, more worldly goods, more skills, more power. You always want more. I suppose I should have wondered what would happen if you didn't get what you wanted._

_But Arafinwë, you…_

It filled Eärwen with relief to know that neither her husband nor her sons had participated in the foul slaying of the Lindarin mariners. That Nerwen _had _killed, even if it had been Noldor and not Lindar whom she slew, that filled Eärwen full to the brim with ambivalence. _You were always a bit strange to me, my girl. Maybe that's why I didn't see that you could do this. _It filled her with relief that none of her family had participated in the slaying of their own kin (Save Nerwen, and Eärwen wondered how she must have felt, to have saved her mother's kin at the expense of her father's). But all the same…

_You still didn't turn back._

Eärwen had thought she knew her husband's kin. She thought she knew Nolofinwë, and Fëanáro, and their children. She thought she knew Lalwen, who was accompanying Nolofinwë. But then, they had done this, and she realized that she didn't know them at all, not really. The people she had known, she never imagined could be capable of something like this. She had lived among them for so many years, and they had treated her as kinswoman, though she was their kin only through marriage. Then, they slew her kin by blood, shed the blood of her blood on the stones and the shores.

She had thought she knew her husband, and her children. She thought she knew Arafinwë, thought she knew Findaráto, Angaráto, Aikanáro, Artaresto, Nerwen. She thought that they were the people she knew best in the world. But Arafinwë had come to find that his brothers and their children had slain his wife's kin, and he still hadn't turned back. Her daughter watched them do it, even fought in the Lindar's defense. Her sons came to find that their mother's kin had been slain by their father's. And they still hadn't turned back.

Was that how little her children thought of their mother, and the blood they had received through her? Did they really think so little of Eärwen and the Lindar, that seeing the Lindar murdered for their ships wasn't enough to turn them back from their course towards Endóre?

Eärwen lingered in Alqualondë in her grief, her pain, her anger. It wasn't long after that, however, that she realized that she couldn't stay.

The memories, of her children, her husband, of seeing the wounded, the dying, the dead, they tormented her. They followed her, step by step by step, across the stones of Alqualondë. They would never leave her alone, not so long as she had the sight of her childhood home, doused in darkness, and the memory of blood staining it, strange and foreign, to fill up her mind.

And there was the way her own people were looking at her, like she was a stranger, like she was going to turn on them the way the Noldor had. Was she really so strange to her own people? Her parents treated her just the same as they had her entire life, but the rest looked at her with shadowed, distrustful eyes.

Was she really grown so strange to her own people?

Was she really to be held accountable for what her family had done?

Eärwen left Alqualondë, and returned to Tirion, lamenting the fact that home was not home any longer, and that their safety had left them far behind. Far from the Lindar, who had treated her with distrust, the remnants of the Noldor seemed relieved to see Eärwen return. She looked into their eyes, and tried not to wonder how many of them had kin who had slain her kin (Somehow, she knew it was all of them).

* * *

Fëanáro—Fëanor  
Nolofinwë—Fingolfin  
Arafinwë—Finarfin  
Findekáno—Fingon  
Nerwen—Galadriel  
Findaráto—Finrod  
Angaráto—Angrod  
Aikanáro—Aegnor  
Artaresto—Orodreth

Ninquelótë—'White Blossom'; an alternate name of Telperion, which I apply mostly to the Teleri, considering that the Númenoreans got _their _white tree, Nimloth, from the Elves of Tol Eressëa, and Nimloth is a Sindarin translation of the Quenya 'Ninquelótë'.  
Culúrien—a name for Laurelin, which I apply mostly to the Teleri.  
Lindar—'The Singers', the name the Teleri of Aman applied to themselves.  
Vaniai—the Telerin Quenya equivalent of 'Vanyar'.  
Oiolossë—'Ever-snow-white'; the most common name amongst the Eldar for the mountain (and city of the same name, in my canon) of Taniquetil; I have, however, made it a name more commonly used by the Teleri and especially the Noldor, to explain how the Elves of Middle-Earth came to call the city by the Sindarin translation of this name, 'Amon Uilos'  
Neri—men (singular: nér)  
Nissi—women (singular: nís)  
Endóre—Middle-Earth (Quenya)


End file.
